Tag Archives: Smarts

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tmobile wing with a new modded ROM

It was hard to come up with a flashy title for this post, but I figured that I get a lot of traffic from people looking for info on the Wing.

As it stands, ActiveSync stopped working some time this week. I installed some apps and thought that one of them could be the culprit, but searching the forums and Googling clues proved to be fruitless. In the end, I resorted to a hard reset (since at this point, it was really important I sync’ed my contacts) and ActiveSync worked just fine.

So, I headed over to Howard Forums to see what the latest was. Actually, I couldn’t remember how to do a hard reset, (couldn’t remember which button to push) and stumbled into the slipperly slope of installing a modded ROM.

First, if you have a Tmobile Wing, you need to read this thread as it is a treasure trove of tips, tricks, and improvements:

On my Wing, I’ve been using the HTC Touch skins on my phone. I really like the improved look and launcher of the phone, but by doing a hard reset (like I had to do to sync again), I need to reinstall all my mods. This isn’t my screen capture but it looks like this:

 

I liked the look so much better. Then tonight I stumbled upon this link and it was a breeze following the directions:

  • Newbs guide to Herald modification *updated* 11/02/07

For those of you guys that don’t know, HTC Herald is the same as the Wing. That thread has a ton of great info in there for you to check out. If you are new to the Wing or wanted to learn more about hacking it, then you need to READ IT COMPLETELY before attempting anything found therein.

Again, this isn’t my screen shot but my Wing now looks like this. I love it:

 

There is a fair amount of customization you have to do, but it isn’t too bad or hard.  I was again able to resync all my data and contacts so it’s good to go, but still have some minor tweaks.

Make sure you check out Part 2 of the FAQ.

 

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a couple of minutes of fame

Tonight, I had the sheer pleasure of being in the live studio audience for a TV special.  If you live in Georgia, you might know who Clark Howard is.  He’s great.  I’ve been listening to him for years and think he’s a great person that has helped a lot of people.  Tonight we taped a show for next Monday’s airing of a real estate special.  My sister-in-law and I were picked to be in the audience.

Some of you know that I am a real estate investor, property manager, and  agent.  My sister-in-law is my broker and we have worked together on a couple of interesting deals.    I have intended this to be my “Plan B” but as you might know, now is not the best time to fall back on this… maybe just not yet.

Anyways, we both enjoyed the show and the message Clark had to say.  If anything, I am more convinced that my philosophy on real estate is definitely solid and on track.  So, that’s a good thing and I am looking good, (if I do say so myself).

I don’t want to take anything away from the show so I won’t post pictures or what was discussed until the show airs.   The show airs on 9/10 @ 8PM Eastern on Channel 2, WSB.  Be sure to set your TiVos’.

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good things afoot

So, those of you paying any attention know that I got notice that I am let go from my current employer. But fret not since I am in excellent company. This year, I have been focusing on creating my “online presence” from blogs, to Twitter, LinkedIn, and recently Facebook. Honestly, I am very proud of my efforts since it allows me to talk about stuff that really gets me excited and even happy. At the very least, it’s an expression of who I am.

On to the future! I am ready to find my dream job and do something that I completely love. An old friend, Lance Weatherby, wrote an excellent post for folks in my position.

Lance pretty much summed up everything I had learned and read about this year. I found it a very helpful post. And I am sure it will help other people in a similar situation.

My wife’s cousin who has done international business gave me a similar lesson, although it was in a 45 minute care ride. His tactics were more for non-tech jobs, but the premise is the same; you got to network.

Having been at the same company for 12+ years, I heard that “you got to network” from every angle. But what does that mean? I had a really hard time figuring that out. For me, it really meant, be yourself. That’s a tough lesson. I guess some people can “sell themselves” but networking with other people means to me to be able to talk about what you know, love, do passionately. Don’t try to bullshit the bullshitter, (as my Dad used to say). Somewhere, along the line, someone I really respected said, “To be free you have to be totally responsible.” That means be honest. I can’t / won’t lie to my wife, employer, friend, etc. I simply can’t do it anymore. It’s not always easy, but I now see it’s the only way I can be. Having said that, I defer to Henry Winkler in “The Waterboy.”

Back to the “networking” issue. Of course I realize you have to sell yourself at some point. That’s the part I need to know more about.More later, but I am feeling very positive.

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Barcamp… Atlanta

Man, only once in a while do I get lucky enough to find out about something very cool ahead of time.  And, it doesn’t hurt to know people.  Check this out:

 Save the date: October 12th and 13th, 2007

Location: Georgia Tech Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Tech Square in Midtown Atlanta

Check back soon for more information and details.

And:

What? You don’t know what BarCamp is?  ‘s okay.  Here’s the Wikipedia page for it:

I’ve never been to anything like this before but I am really excited that I might get to go, (limited number of signups).

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Linux Webcams

Oh boy! I’m using the Safari beta on WinXP tonight. I have to say, that I was getting tired of Firefox slowing down my Powerbook that I decided to try Safari. So far, so good. I liked it so much, I am trying the Safari beta at home. So, I’ve been busy. Things have been good and I feel like I’ve been flexing my mental muscle. I’ve been spending my last few nights trying to get webcams working under Linux. I have a cheap-o webcam and was trying to help someone set up a situation where their family from overseas can “check in” on them from time to time.Again, as in most of my projects, I don’t want to pay for software and I want to remain legit. For WinXP, I found this site to be really useful:

(ah, a bug with safari… mental note and switching back to FireFox).

This was an incredibly useful site. I found this software linked from it:

I was really impressed with YawCam. It did everything I could imagine and then some.

  • live stream
  • password protected (various users)
  • scheduling
  • logging
  • tweaks

If you are running Windows, I’d recommend using that. It was really great. But, I wanted to take it further. I have an old Dell Laptop running Ubuntu. I’ll write a much more comprehensive post later about all the different options I found, but in the meantime, I have come to love Motion:

Motion For Linux

I ended up building it from source, (which was a pain in the ass getting all the right dpkg’s installed). But it is slick. Ken is my new hero:

  • Kenneth Lavrsen’s Web Cameras

The tar.gz Ken distributes has config files that are outdated. It took me a little while to figure that out, but if you read the wiki, then you should be able to figure it out. Maybe I’ll release my configs.

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multiple updates on various junk

I’ve been busy. It’s been good and I see progress being made. I see the light at the end of the tunnel. So, this post is going to be a mini-update to a bunch of stuff I got in the hopper.

Tmobile Wing

Man, I love this thing. Today I put new skins on it, and installed some really great apps. I’ll provide a more detailed post on it. Going from PalmOS to WM6 was painless and easy. I almost don’t even think of it. I miss on flash card program but other than that, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to a Palm-based phone.

XMBC on the Xbox

My brother-in-law is really happy with his hacked Xbox. We watched all sorts of international TV this weekend. I found this after poking around. Why hadn’t I found it before?

I found some great games I am playing on my Xbox. ChessMaster was really hard to find:

Trixbox

I am getting a lot of hits on my website for Trixbox related things. I hope you guys are finding it helpful. I’d love to hear some feedback.

Continue reading →

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More Tmobile Wing, things

Before I begin, I would like to send some complaints to my friend Brown who not only helped me tune up my rear derailleur on my bike in preparation of this weeks Muddy Buddy, but he also gave me a bottle of wine he made several years ago; it’s excellent! This is only the second home-made wine I’ve had and this is indeed, a special treat.

I couldn’t resist the pun. I’m seeing a fair amount of traffic to my site over my posts about the Tmobile Wing. As I said, I love it. I mean it. There are some annoyances with it, but nothing out of the ordinary (compared with WinXP for example). I think I’ve done quite a lot with it.

Tonight, I succeeded in overclocking it to 260Mhz, (stock speed is 200Mhz). For me the difference is so much but I do like that the menus and the screen change / refresh happens more smoothly when you open the slider. I’ve gotten into turning off the WiFI and Bluetooth is if am not using it. The Comm Manager is pretty easy to access and use so I think that will help the battery life while it is being over clocked. And I say succeeded since when I first tried it, I was getting some weird blank screens and someone posted instructions for a manual install of the overclocking app and it worked great.

Continue reading →

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Will my Tmobile Wing replace my iPod?

Actually, no, it won’t replace my iPod but it will see more time with me. If you’ve been reading along, I got a Tmobile Wing. I love it. I’ve been a Treo user, (from a 600 to a 650) and have been a Palm user since my first Palm V. So going to a Windows Mobile based phone is something different, but not so much so. In my other posts about my Mio c310x, you’ll see that the Mio runs Windows CE. Therefore, I already have some experience.

A couple of the things I like about my iPod is Podcasts and being able to listen to stuff in the car while in transit to and from work. Since my commute is roughly +/- 30 minutes, I typically take that time to listen to a language podcast or do some language lessons. If you’ve seen my other posts about that, you’ll learn that I am also trying to learn German.

But at my PC or my Mac at work, I love listening to live music. Live in the sense that I am listening to streaming music; Internet radio. There is some sort of connection I feel when I am listening to someone else “talking to me.” The iPod doesn’t let me have that connection that I get when I am listening to something online. I thought about getting the FM transmitter for my iPod but who the hell wants to listen to FM when I’ve been spoiled by satellite? *shudder*

I have also gotten into the habit of listening to German audio when I am in bed going to sleep. I’ve read about how the mind absorbs information and processes it while you sleep. I also read that listening to foreign languages often will subconsciously help you with word order and pronunciation. Could be snake oil, but what the heck. Since the iPod has a sleep timer, it was easy to set it to shut off after 30 minutes. But the lack of frequent updates of the Podcasts and the level I am at helped contribute to an amount of boredom with the content on my iPod. I started to listen to music and not practice my language skills.

Now, on the Wing, it has Windows Media Player on it. And I didn’t sign up for a data plan since it is WiFi enabled and I have at least two AP’s at any given time. I’ve found the data connection via WiFi to be more than satisfactory since many of the WAP or Mobile enabled sites I go to have way less ads on them so web browsing from the device is pretty good.

More importantly, WMP is great at streaming online content. I started off testing with my old standby’s and moved to the holy grail for me; 24 hour streaming German news. It works and it works well. I didn’t experience too much rebuffering and with the USB-style headset/headphones that came with the Wing, the audio was quite good.

I was really excited to go to bed, listening to “live” content and in German. It work so well. In fact, I dreamt that I was in Germany and was having a hard time understanding what people were saying. It was a great, lucid dream that I found very encouraging. One of the high points was that I was in the library and they were selling beer inside; what a great idea!

So, with the Wing, I have to say that I still like it. The only drawbacks I have encountered thus far is that it appears WM5 and WM6 are different enough that not all applications work or that I don’t know all the shortcuts yet. Being able to make SIP calls with my home Trixbox PBX is really slick.

No, the Wing will not replace my iPod… but I think for what each device does, they certainly compliment each other with what I want to do, and that results in a product that makes ME happy.

Streaming Online radio that makes me happy:

Mobile / WAP websites that make me happy:

Mind resources:

I’ll post more Wing/WM6 updates as I learn and come up with stuff.

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cool beans

I saw I got a mention over at the Earthlink blog about my new Tmobile Wing. Now, I feel I am on the hook for delivering some decent content. Shouldn’t be a problem since I have a lot to say about my new Wing. In a Nutshell, I love it.

Now, I know here in the U.S we are about 10 years behind the rest of the world with cellular technology. We have no nationwide 3G network. However, my wife and I have been long-time Tmobile customers ever since we had a cell phone with Powertel. I saw the posting in November about Tmobile getting the huge FCC contract, which made little news here in the US but I think this is a pretty good thing for us Tmobile customers;

I’ll probably provide a more detailed review of the Wing but right now, I’m sort of riding high since I just made my first SIP call from the Wing, which is registering with my Trixbox here at home.

Tmobile now has a phone, which I believe at this point is only available in Seattle, that can make calls over WiFi or the GSM network. The Wing has a pretty robust WiFi setup so I was thinking how cool it would be to use SIP at home. I don’t really use Skype a whole lot so I haven’t tried it, (but it is on my list of things to do).  I’ll have to wait and see, but it appears that as long I am on my home WiFi setup, I can register via SIP to my SIP server and make and receive calls, (as long as I add my “extension” to the call hunt), via my Wing. I like that idea… it’s pretty cool, if you ask me.

If you are curious how I am making SIP calls from my Wing, I am using SJphone for Windows Mobile.  It’s free!

More to come…

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My new Tmobile WING

Lucky you, you got two posts in a night!

So, I got me a Tmobile Wing.   Holy Smokes, I love this phone.  I currently have a Treo 650 from work and the Wing smokes it entirely.  I have encountered a bit of a learning curve due to the fact I am going from Palm OS to WM6, but hey… something new to learn.   I’m putting it through its paces.  Since my Mio c310x is Windows CE and this is Windows Mobile 6, I’m not entirely lost and that’s partially why I like this phone so much.

I am going to continue to play and learn about it, and then I’ll create a more detailed post.  But I love it, and it’s a great phone in my opinion.